A Prisoner of Precision
by marapozsa
Summary: post-game. balthierpenelofran. character death. You would think that he would never die in vain, but it was my fault he did.


**A PRISONER OF PRECISION.**

_aethere._

**note.** Written for the Always and Forever challenge at the Je t'adore graphics/writing forum from Fran's point of view...although I usually don't do first person. Balthier dies, by the way. So does Penelo.

-

If he were still alive, it would be two years exactly today.

Two years - of what? Anything but happiness, this I knew for certain. For by two years, I meant two years of not knowing, not speaking, not eating, until finally, the day of her own death came, and all of this became nothing living. Nothing but everything not. In short, not happy. Penelo was anything but happy - and so too am I now. It is not in my nature to believe it is right for me to be happy. It never has been.

If it were my own mate, I would have mourned much the same way, but I still would not waste away as Penelo did. That was because I was made of stronger armor and the heart that was put into my breast was made for strife. I believed I would still have no right even if I were a frail mortal hume like the girl. If it were her husband that survived, and she the one with a pauper's grave, he would have been as aggrieved, and I might have aided him. I knew him so well; it would have been so much easier for all of us.

But pain brought knowledge.

I found that Penelo was not as shallow of a girl as she once was. Her love was not as easily gained and stolen as it had once been. She resembles...resembled him in that manner. I would never go so far as to say they were very similar, but when Penelo grew up, I saw her expand to fit into the impression he left behind.

Yes, I do remember him. Balthier was what he told us to call him. Ffamran was his birthname, one he despised. He said so in his sleep once. That was when I was the one that shared his bed. He was named Ffamran, for his grandfather, a drug-addict with no amount of self-respect in any inch of his oversized girth, which oozed contempt for a sense of fairness and reeked of beer. Balthier, too, smelled always of liquor, but I, with my sensitive nose, could not complain that it was an unpleasant stench. Rather, he lightened the scent with his very youth (to viera, all men are young) even as his eyes hid some dark pain no one, not even I or Penelo, could fathom. This was our burden as the sole two women in his life. Ashe had never counted. That was why he returned her ring. And Vaan, to whom Penelo has always been close, did not understand our bond. Basch sensed it and chose not to intrude. They were not the sort that Vaan was. Their very gait told you of it. Their very smell told of their character.

Ashe smelled forever of pomegranates (a cursed fruit for the viera, to whom it is poison), Basch of sweat, and Vaan of sweet mountain spring water, despite his desert origins.

Balthier told me that I, too, smelled of the sea. I know he meant it, but at the time I only blinked and acted as if it meant nothing. It did. Oceanwater was a different sort of water than Vaan's, a stronger and saltier sort, but it was water nonetheless, fluid and ever-changing. I will never have doubt that he was not sincere. I knew. I know. I cannot scent myself, as it is improper, but Penelo bore my scent under his. She wasted too far to have any scent of her own besides the sea and the sky, though once she smelled of lilies and fresh dirt.

Penelo was no longer human, but something else. Something with no purpose or desire. It pained me to have my nostrils flare at entering her rooms, ones she once shared with Balthier, only to realize that only lingering scents purged the room of stillness. My visits were the only ones that brought fresh air into her bedchamber, still untouched by any other man except him. Her sheets were always dry, her monthly cycles stifled long ago. With them went her many other flows of blood as well. She, like her sleeping place, was sterile.

She, like Balthier, is already dead.

She has been dead for quite some time.

It was thoughts of this ilk - scents mainly - that filled my mind on this day. Oftentimes, this would be a season of radiance for Dalmasca, for it is a country that has proved resilient and tough. Its beauty a mimicry of peace it has never had, except under the Dynast-King of centuries past, I sympathized with this country as a young child. But I now resent it because it has no time for delicate beings like Penelo. Only hardy blossoms bloom here. When there are none to be found, only weeds remain. Weeds and dead things - like Penelo.

This particular summer weighed down on our heads like stone weights, rather than freeing our spirits. With it is the gagging smell of dried blood. With it is the scent of airships in the sky with bombs weighing their hulls down.

Death spread its malady everywhere, killing many with cruel bright weapons and others (like Penelo and I) with even more malicious, but secretive, methods.

Death had a cold laugh I had become accustomed to. This laugh was one no one could ignore; not if it was the only thing your husband heard before dying; not if the same could be said for you. Everyone feared it. I, too, could not hide from it. Not even the viera could hide from it in their sheltered woodland villages, craning their speckled hare's ears to listen only to the Green Word and not the colder, more metallic words of humes.

Humes' words are more truthful than the Wood's, but still no one had desire to expose it for what it was - cowardice and instinct. The answers lurked in the eyes of any seeq, moogle, or bangaa you passed by on the street. The answer (if there was a question at all) was that yes, they did fear it, only it was not their place or anyone's to say so.

In Rabanastre, this was especially true. The city was meant for heat, but not that sort of heat. Not still heat. Flowing heat, flowing people, ripples of movement in crowds that trickled away into places like Lowtown as the war and its great sum of corpses nudged itself into the hearts of many. The city was not so well-aired to keep these things away. Despite this, it did not quell its inhabitants like the walls of Archades, that great city to the north (now fallen for the sake of the war). The walls of Rabanastre were not like those of Balfonheim either. That was because Balfonheim had no walls, only smooth stone worn away by the sea: the same sea that, once, I was likened to by a daring sky-pirate whose roots had thought to be uprooted, but still they lay within the borders of his father's grasp. Still, this sky-pirate I tell you of was not free. He told me himself; and contrary to popular belief, my sky-pirate never lied, nor pilfered - at least not when I could do it for him. Once, he was a judge. After that, it seemed that the law clung to him like the light smell of drink.

He was only ever as guilty as others thought him to be.

Penelo thought so. He could always fool her. She loved him so much. I think sometimes too much. Penelo, the fool of a girl, thought his letters always smelled of his cologne (it masked the alcohol). She thought that the handkerchief she'd given him as a tender girl of eighteen was the same one she buried with him as a broken woman of twenty. She also that that if she asked, he would always dance, always laugh, and always fly.

I could have told her, but I am not so cruel.

I could have told her, when she was still of flesh and I of stone, that he had never been so liberated as to fly, yet I never had the cruelty...or perhaps the courage, for only a woman with a heart of nails could tell a woman with a heart of gold that her husband had never been faithful, nor had he ever been able to take wing.

But then again, I have never believed that Penelo - and not I - acted as the anchor that held him down.


End file.
